25 Luxuries That Only the Ultra-Rich Can Afford

When it comes to extreme wealth, most of us imagine luxury cars, private jets, and sprawling mansions. But what do the super-rich spend their money on that the average person wouldn’t even think about? A recent Reddit thread explored this very question, and the answers are both fascinating and mind-blowing.

#1

Image source: TheCoolerking101, freepik

Entrance into grad schools. My buddy worked at an Ivy league school. Whenever someone applied for grad school and mentioned that his or her family were donors, my friend’s job was to look up how much was donated by the family. If they donated a certain amount, the kid got in…automatically. This was back in 1998. I think the amount was about 250,000.

#2

Image source: zerbey, Leo Iordache

I knew a rich guy who would buy himself and his entire family premium season tickets to the local basketball stadium every year. The cost was probably around $80,000. They had priority seating in one of the booths. They went maybe twice a year.

#3

Image source: Philoplex, Wesley Tingey

Late to the party, but some very rich people that I know through my family have a 15-foot tall motion activated fire breathing dragon statue.

Yes, you heard me. Fire. Breathing. Dragon. Statue.

When you drive past it, it breaths a 4-foot plume of fire straight up into the air.

#4

Image source: yaosio, Kindel Media

Access to get out of jail free cards. You don’t even have to buy anything, just have the correct level of wealth. Get drunk and run over a bunch of kids? Boys will be boys!

#5

Image source: throwaway_lmkg, Gary M. Cohen

So a few months ago, for the weekend, I went and saw the Hearst Castle. For the uninformed, this is private castle that William Randolf Hearst, the newspaper millionaire, built out in Big Sur on the California Coast. He would send private invites to all the intellectual and political elite of Hollywood and San Francisco for the parties that he hosted every weekend. The parties have stopped, but the structure is still there.

S**t was *unreal*.

You walk up to the building, and the doorway has this 30-foot archway over it, carved from stone. Very ornate, angles and Latin inscriptions and all that. And the tour guide is like, this is a Roman archway about 1600 years old, that was the entryway to a cathedral in southern Italy. And you’re like, wait a second… I’m in California, and this is literally the side of a building.

The whole place is like that. Every room, every wall, every hallway.

The dude collected *ceilings*. He has a *ceiling collection*. He has like *forty goddamn ceilings* from a variety of churches and cathedrals in Spain from the 1300s-1600s. Each of his thirty-odd guest bedrooms has a different antique ceiling that he bought and shipped from a different medieval Spanish church and had his builders incorporate into his mansion. And half those bedrooms also have balconies or windows that were part of Roman villas, and most of the bathroom doors are Renaissance woodwork.

The entertaining room where people hung out and smoked before dinner, one of the walls consists of this big wooden structure that is where the Choir used to sit during mass in some big-a*s European church. There are more of those upstairs, in the hallway between his bedroom and the library. The library has like two thousand Greek urns and amphora.

I asked how s**t like this was accomplished, apparently he had multiple full-time staff working in Europe whose sole job was to find him five-hundred-year-old buildings for sale, so that he could ship their walls and arches off to California for his castle.

This is *one* of his mansions. This is the “1400s Spain”-themed mansion. Apparently there’s another one further north in California that’s “1600s France”-themed. I haven’t read anything about it, but at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if he literally bought 6 chateaus, airlifted them from France to California, and stitched them together to make an even bigger château.

#6

Image source: anon, Mat Brown

Time. You can really buy time. I used to work assisting a chef who did a lot of specialty (vegan or gluten free or macro or w/e) private dinners for rich people. Not big parties, just small dinner parties. I got to go to some ridiculously fancy penthouse apartments and I wound up being friends with the son of a very famous musician for a while.

Think about all the little things that you do in a day: getting ready in the morning, grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, making phone calls, paying bills, going to the bank, etc- now imagine you don’t have to do any of them. They’re all done for you, and you don’t have to even think about them if you don’t want to. Your time spent traveling is also at a minimum because you take helicopters or private planes everywhere. You have so much more free time, leisure time, and you don’t have to ever deal with one of life’s little inconveniences again. Even the guy I was friends with (who was in college and trying to live a pretty normal life) had meals and groceries delivered, used a car service all the time, had his laundry picked up and done, etc- so he had all this time that normal college kids don’t have, to do his work or play music or whatever he felt like.

Everyone can sort of imagine the luxury items (art, cars, jewelry etc) but the part that is hard for regular people to understand is that, unless you want to, you don’t have to be involved in picking out what painting you want or looking at your budget or making the deal or anything. You just say, “I think we should have a painting on this wall” and then you get one. It’s pretty sweet, honestly. All the homes I was in had really great collections of one kind or another because the rich person could basically have a staff member whose entire job was to find, restore, and display Soviet toy cars or something.

#7

Image source: wanderingbilby, Colin Watts

Commercial real estate, mineral rights, and other investment products. The scale of the investment goes up as wealth increases, since after a certain point wealth is “self-sustaining” if invested properly.

They might also have a hobby of buying collectables likely to appreciate, such as rare cars, motorcycles, or other vehicles, wines, art, and jewellery. These items are ways of holding wealth that rarely depreciate and aren’t subject to inflation.

#8

Did gardening for some crazy rich people. The house is bigger than the high school I went to. Is in its own neighborhood inside the richest neighborhood. The f*****g wife would drive down the driveway at 40 mph. She was in charge of the house. She had a full time house manager, who had 3 full time people delegating s**t for her.
We grew her vegetable garden. Other people picked the fruit. Other people cooked them. Other people served them. Other people cleaned the dishes and other people took out the trash. This garden was gorgeous. Tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, zucchini, mangoes, peaches, bananas, strawberries, and on and on. We literally were told to pull off every slightly brown leaf. It looked a dollhouse garden. Then she would decide she didn’t like that kind of tomato, so we’d pull out big beautiful producing plants, and plant a different variety. Truckloads of waste, every week. And then she f*****g fired us. It wasn’t good enough.

Image source: anon

#9

Image source: Stanley R. Wigglesworth, olegdoroshenko

Kidnap and Ransom insurance, though the world is weird enough that rich people could start bragging about it as a status symbol like a Bentley.

#10

Image source: lookielurker, WildNorthPhotography

My mom used to work for a pretty wealthy guy and his wife. His wife took a liking to me, so sometimes I got to stay with her while my mom was working. They weren’t in the top 1%, but still pretty well off.

Doggie spas, I knew those were a thing. When they sent their iguana to what was basically a spa for a week…well, that I didn’t know was a thing. They had 4, maybe 5 bathrooms, and a specific person on the payroll just to scrub interior grout. They also had a guy employed to do nothing but rinse their cars after every drive in the winter, because we use salt on our roads, and he hated rust.

#11

They pay for people. My cousin is married to a insanely rich man, billions. He had pro tennis players helicoptered in to his Hamptons mansion for tennis lessons.

Image source: Tommyboy420

#12

Image source: theultimateusername, Marcin Ciszewski

I’m friends with a few of the superbly rich wealthy people of the middle east (mainly Bahrain and the UAE); some are very high up royal family and others own part of of some of the biggest family-corporations in the region. I estimate some of the net worth of these people to go anywhere from $10 million up to $500 million each.

Yacht options: We’re talking ridiculous yachts you would never use except for a few days a year. I know a sheikh who bought one specifically for use at the Abu Dhabi Formula 1 race – this is a 3-day event; you park your yacht at the dock and watch the race from there, then have a ridiculous party with overflowing drinks and 50+ random spanish girls who showed up from god knows where and music till the early hours of the morning, repeat for 3 days. Besides the simple act of buying a yacht (which could be anywhere from $10-50m) which is fine, there’s the re-doing of the whole yacht in special-order leather and wood grain all over with your name on it, including the everything from the seating area to the little wine glasses in the kitchen below, which was an additional $2 million for bespoke option of having your name engraved everywhere….

Music Studio: One of the sheikhs I know was always into music, and decided to build a studio. He spent about $7 million prepping it up with the best possible equipment in the world and hired some high level engineers and producers from around the world (these guys have worked on some of the biggest albums in the world) to sit there and work full time at this studio which was empty 95% of the time. Mind you these guys were being paid a minimum of $200k+ a year to be there not including their lavish housing, expenses, cars, etc.

Art: The way these guys buy art is silly. I was with one of them at an auction where he decided to spend only $100k because it wasn’t “his type of art”. This piece he bid on at $50k went up and and up to about $500k, and the auctioneer looked at the guy and said, Gentlemen in the back? When a few of the rich in the room looked at him he said, oh hell why not, ok. Bought it for $500k and walked out.

A lot more of these examples. Fun guys.

On the more philanthropic side of things, I know some who sponsor children, families and students in poorer countries, enough money to give them a living, education, and much more. Some of them sponsor a few hundred families each..

#13

Image source: anon, Shadowman39

I stayed at a guys place who is in the top 100 richest people in Britain, and that dude had a f*****g HUGE Knex set.

I mean, it was a huge alcove just full of the stuff.

#14

Oooooh I finally have something to say. I worked commercial painting for a place in the mountains for. Billionaire that owned power plants. His house was 50,000 sq ft. He had it built on a mountain and he purchased the mountain along with several other of the surrounding mountains. He had it levelled for his home and then he used the stone to build a stone wall around the house. He owned a *city* out in Texas somewhere and had his favourite bar imported. *the entire building* with swinging doors and a stained glass window and a full bar. Just to be staining the wood in the bar cost him 50,000 dollars a day. We were there for over a year! The rooms all had bathroom with sinks made by hand in Italy. The windows were all from Italy and he had a huge trophy room in the basement. He had a helicopter pad and a landing strip for his plane. What was this all for? It was a *hunting lodge* not even a house but rather a place where he could come hunt if he wanted to. That was unreal the place was enormous.

Image source: y_13

#15

Image source: 112663636, Terry Browning

One word: art.

I grew up with two artists as parents and my uncle is a high-end art dealer and it always shocks me when people don’t realise just how expensive art can be and how rich the people that buy it are.

I mean sure the super rich buy mansions and super-cars and sports teams, but just about anyone that’s ever watched a music video knows that. What I generally notice people being the most shocked about is almost always art.

To put things into perspective: the most expensive painting my uncle sold last year was worth 18 million GBP. It was in a private sale. To put that in perspective, how much of your net worth would you spend on a single painting to hang up in your house? 10%? 5%? I don’t know many people with only a million bucks that would shell out 50k on a single painting. Let’s say 2% is generous, at 2% then that person would have ~900 million GBP. But I may have forgotten to mention that this painting was to be part of a collection.

The most expensive painting I’ve ever HELD with my own hands was eventually auctioned off for ~44 million USD. That’s more money than I will make in 10 lifetimes.

#16

Image source: popsnicker, DC Studio

In home hospitals. Imagine a fully equipped ER with all the machines redone with wood paneling and designed to integrate into a room of your house. This is one of the newer things the über rich are installing to separate themselves further from the proletarian.

#17

My cousin married an extremely wealthy stock broker/lawyer/entrepreneur. Not really even sure of his net worth, but they are loaded. Huge house, huge infinity pool (where the water flows over the side), fully stocked bar/wine cellar. The dude’s scotch collection is probably worth more than my house. Buys some insane car every year. Just bought an Aston Martin and some custom Porsche not even legal to register in my state. Last year the guy was driving a Rolls Royce.

Now, none of that is even what surprised me. It’s all stuff you would expect a millionaire to own. Living on Long Island (I’m considered lower middle class), I’ve had a few wealthy friends. I’m not downplaying how awesome all of that stuff is, but living here will make you jaded to fast cars and big houses because they’re everywhere.

I went to his house for Christmas Eve last year and since he knows I’m such a tech nerd, he showed me his server room. In his house. The dude doesn’t have computers in each room, he has a huge a*s rack of computers that power his entire house. It’s a tech nerds wet dream. His home is completely automated. The lights, thermostat, music (speakers in every room). Cable boxes (and Dish Network for redundancy), security cameras. All run from a central location in his basement. Now, all in all it probably doesn’t even cost near as much as one of his cars, but I’ve just never even considered a set up like that in a home.

So yeah TLDR: If you’re rich you can power all the computers/TV’s/speakers etc of your house from a server in your basement.

Image source: 1337syntaX

#18

Image source: anon, wahyu_t

Sometimes I think the little things are more impressive than the big purchases. I stayed at a vacation home of a family with a net worth north of $300 million – mind you it was just one of their 5 or 6 residences.

The home itself was incredible but the detail I noticed was their cable TV. They had the most expensive cable package available – every channel you could think of – for a home that they visit *maybe* once a year. It’s one thing to own a multi-million dollar vacation home, but throwing away several thousand dollars a year for the privilege of watching TV one weekend a year is different thing entirely.

#19

Image source: Harish R, Hashmi3

Oxygen, Yep you read that right, You must have heard that there was a shop in delhi which during the peak pollution was offering pure oxygen to people, I don’t think so any poor can even think about it.

#20

Image source: Sensei2006, Mathias Reding

When companies like Lamborghini and Koenesgegg make limited edition supercars worth, like, 6 million each. Those cars are usually paid for before they are done being built.

Somewhere out there, is a few garages where there are dozens of these insane super cars are just sitting. Unused. I can’t imagine being so rich that 6 million for a decoration seems trivial.

#21

Image source: FadeIntoReal, malitskiybogdan

I worked for a guy with so much money he bought charter flights so he could smoke on them. About $40,000 a flight. He was smoking c***k. You know the $350 cleaning fee for smoking in a non-smoking hotel room? He laughed at it.

Edit: The extended cruises. I know a girl who was a hairdresser on a cruise line that catered to the extremely wealthy. The shortest voyage they offered was six months. One could literally sail around the world on a cruise ship.

#22

You already know about the houses, cars, jewelry, boats, sports teams, etc. But maybe you don’t know about the stem cell treatments. Not the kind you get in the USA, made up of cells extracted from your own fat- I mean the kind you can get in Panama, made of placenta/cord blood. Very popular amongst the very wealthy.

Image source: Michael Feder

#23

Image source: dirtymoney, cottonbro studio

They pay people to do the most mundane of activities for them.

#24

Image source: vflaneur, Rohit Raj

I work with a very rich a chinese entrepreneur. He smokes black Russian cigarettes with filters re-wrapped with 24k gold. Pure excess.

#25

One of my good friends is a self made multi-millionaire who is easily in the top 1%. Through him I’ve learned a bit about how extremely rich people spend their time. Here are some tidbits:

– Some of them have their lives run by their wealth. When you have so much money managing it takes up a ton of time. Being rich almost becomes a job in and of itself.

– Everything becomes disposable and loses value. My friends younger siblings don’t care about their lambo or rolex or goose jacket because they know they can buy another the second they want it. Kids have a way of convincing themselves they deserve their lifestyle and can become completely delusioned.

– Organic wines, flying in private jets to stay in a country for a day, ridiculous watches, oil rigs, and private yachts (with submarines) are some of the things they can buy.

– Money can be isolating. Many wealthy people realize that a lot of people befriend them and want to use them. So they put up walls and it can be difficult to make friends.

Image source: anon